


i am ready to reap the whirlwind

by postcardmystery



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Blood, F/F, F/M, M/M, Murder, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 10:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how it goes: London smells like wet leather and fresh blood, they’re wearing both and he’s got a bar through his tongue and a scar through his eyebrow that keeps catching in the light of the bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am ready to reap the whirlwind

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for blood, violence, and murder.

This is how it goes: London smells like wet leather and fresh blood, they’re wearing both and he’s got a bar through his tongue and a scar through his eyebrow that keeps catching in the light of the bar.

This is how it goes: Paris trickles ash down its streets, and it doesn’t smell like garlic, even the if the stories say it’s so. (Don’t hurt him, anyway.) His fangs sink into her neck every night for a month and she laughs, delighted, every time.

This is how it goes: Rome is death and heat and crosses about everybody’s neck, black shades on and Italian he speaks much better than he pretends on his sneering lips. She pulls moped riders clean off their bikes and buys the entire contents of a doll shop. He fucks a priest, who likes it, then shows him his real face, which he doesn’t. 

This is how it goes, this is how it goes, until.

Until, it doesn’t.

Next stop, Sunnydale.

 

 

In 1880 he’s three months old and he feels Angelus’s heavy hand at the back of his neck like a yoke. Darla laughs like firelight and his Dru is his, except for all the ways she isn’t. He goes out and the streetwalkers laugh at the voice that coats his tongue like port, thick and red and betraying him all the while. He pulls one into an alley corner and makes her sing for him, until he can make her sounds, until he’s satisfied in mimicry. She tastes like oranges when she dies, and he laughs, even that sounding different, his throat constricting anew.

On the way home, the mob finds him, but he’s William the Bloody, now, and it does them no good.

 

 

Here is a list of things that never get old: standing up in a convertible, heavy boots on the seat while Dru goes ninety up the highway, the wind against his skin, black-nailed fingers leaving long lines in the glass of the windscreen. Tucking his mouth into the crook of Dru’s elbow, and  _just_  grazing the skin. Painting his fingernails with one hand on the wheel and the other in Dru’s lap, her thighs smeared black. The Pistols on the stereo and his hair bleached clean, the scent hanging around him like stars. The Clash in his ears and her teeth against his hipbone. His hand in hers, her hand in his, and then in in  _in_.

These things never got old. Don’t believe him. He’s a liar. He’s a liar, and if anyone knows it, it’s him.

 

 

“Nod yer head fer yes,” says Angelus, his hand around Spike’s throat, and he manages it, just.

“You’ve been a bad boy, William,” says Dru, sounding not a bit upset, and every bit excited, and Darla rolls her eyes.

“Just fuck him already,” she says, fingers on Angelus’s pocket watch, “I do so want to go to the opera.”

Spike sneers as best he can, he knows how this goes, he’s been to, read, read for this play. Angelus sneers back, but it’s never quite as nasty, can’t make his face twist quite right. (It’s always about his eyes, you see.)

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says, and then those fangs that did-not-make him are sliding into his neck, and he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t, he doesn’t.

(Dru’s eyes on him, Daddy’s hands. Course he does.)

 

 

Dru’s somewhere else, Angel’s staked his claim in LA -  _get it_  - and Spike’s not ready to run, doesn’t have a city with his name written all over it in cheap perfume and expensive booze and starlight.

“Do you miss what you used to have?” says Giles, glasses low on his nose and his gaze too clever by half, and it’s a test, it’s always a test.

“Liar is as liar does, mate,” says Spike, and Giles pushes over the whisky, does not push in entirely a different vein.

 

 

Here’s a city that isn’t his, and a voice he has no right to wear. There’s no one left who loves him, but his family’s at his back. (What’s left of it. Angel isn’t something Angelus wears, not exactly, but the differences aren’t so big from where Spike’s standing, which is, all too often, under the heel of the old man’s boot.) Here’s a coat he stripped from a Slayer still-warm, and his nails are black and his eyes are lined. (He hasn’t done that in a few years, but armour’s armour, when the chips are down.)

“S’not yours,” he says, means,  _me_ , and Angel shrugs, and, rarely, does not scowl, and Spike says nothing, thinks of eyes that burn every time they look at him, blonde hair gone cold, lips that spoke _effulgent_ , knows that it could be worse, if he can bring himself to not be a liar, one last time.


End file.
